Tubular Solar Panels Slash Costs, Boost Efficiency
There are a lot of reasons to think that flat solar panels would be the right way to go. The best way to capture sunlight is by being perpendicular to the sun and it's usually cheaper to make things flat than round. But the folks at Solyndra have discovered that this traditional wisdom might be a bit faulty.
First, as to the second point, when dealing with thin-film CIGS solar panels, cylindrical is just as good as flat. But the first point, concerning harvesting the maximum amount of sunlight, gets a little confusing.
The cylindrical solar panels (think of fluorescent tube lights...except in reverse) can absorb energy from every direction, and when combined with a white roof (which are now the only legal, flat roofs in California) can capture up to 20% more light than traditional solar panels. The other gigantic advantage is that they don't have to move to track the sun. The panels are always presenting some of their face directly perpendicular to the sun.
By removing solar-tracking and orientation from the equation, these systems can simply be laid onto roofs. Tracking solar panels have to be able to resist the force of strong winds, these will just lay flat and out of the way reducing installation costs, which often comprise about half of the price of a solar project.
And with 30 billion square feet of flat roofs in America, this could be quite a market for cheap, clean electricity. Solyndra just announced, in fact, that they've got $1.2 B in contracts throughout Europe and America, and I can't imagine that going anywhere but up.
Full press release from Solyndra below
via: Scientific American
